I’m pleased to share that TESL Reporter recently published an article that I co-authored with Dr. Michael Lessard-Clouston titled “Corpora and English Language Teaching: Pedagogy and Practical Applications for Data-Driven Learning.” In short, our article aims to help ESL teachers see potential uses for corpus linguistics in English language teaching by providing both an overview of key concepts and hands-on introductory worksheets that help English language learners use online corpora to study collocations.

I hope you will find the ideas and worksheets helpful. If you have any comments or questions, I would love to hear from you!

Thanks for your question, Lois! I think with lower-level students, I might introduce them to the idea of looking at concordance lines (by printing them out from a corpus website) and searching for collocational patterns. (I think the COCA might be too overwhelming for them to navigate on their own.)

Additionally, the LexTutor webpage has a feature called a Multi-Concordance that uses corpus technology as a vocabulary learning tool. Go to http://www.lextutor.ca/conc/multi/, enter a few words into the box and click “BUILD.” You can go back and test out the three different mode options: Plain, Gaps, and Quiz. This is something you could teach your students to do on their own, or you could also print these out for use in class.